New Books In Environmental Studies

Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister's book  Projective Ecologies (Harvard Graduate School of Design 2014) is about how landscape architecture can move forward in the design field beyond garden landscapes to delve into the serious issues of climate change and land use master planing affecting our global landscapes today. Projective ecologies is a “how to get started” guide to understanding what we can control, what we can’t control, and to embrace all of the creative chaos to produce good and meaning peacemaking for humans and nature.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomi

Vacant lots, so often seen as neighborhood blight, have the potential to be a key element of community revitalization. As manufacturing cities reinvent themselves after decades of lost jobs and population, abundant vacant land resources and interest in green infrastructure are expanding opportunities for community and environmental resilience. Vacant to Vibrant: Creating Successful Green Infrastructure Networks (Island Press, 2019) explains how inexpensive green infrastructure projects can reduce stormwater runoff and pollution, and provide neighborhood amenities, especially in areas with little or no access to existing green space.Sandra Albro offers practical insights through her experience leading the five-year Vacant to Vibrant project, which piloted the creation of green infrastructure networks in Gary, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; and Buffalo, New York. Vacant to Vibrant provides a point of comparison among the three cities as they adapt old systems to new, green technology. An overview of the larger econo

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health. Readers join him driving passed no-till, precision agriculture fields in Kansas to walking around The Centre for No-Till Agriculture in Kumasi, Ghana. Each step of the way we are reminded that adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution to align agricultural production and environmental outcomes. Throughout the book, evidence mounts -- maybe farmers and ranchers can feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return pr

In Copper Stain: ASARCO’s Legacy in El Paso (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros tell the story of how a Mexican American community in El Paso have fought back against environmental injustice. The physical and social legacy of the ASARCO smelter are told through the testimonies of more than one hundred workers and community members living and surviving in the midst of toxic exposure.Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltateLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Wilderness,” “nature,” and their “preservation” are concepts basic to how the National Park Service organizes our relationship to American land. They are also contested concepts, geographer and environmental historian Laura Alice Watt shows in The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore (University of California Press, 2016), and when used as administrative categories they can encourage visions of a static, unpeopled, unworked landscape that both obscures the historical record and concretely alters the very ecologies the NPS has set out to preserve. Watt precisely narrates a rich case study of the sweeping lands and waters surrounding Point Reyes, an hour north of San Francisco in Marin County, where complex, more-than-aesthetic histories of cattle ranching and oyster cultivation have run up against increasingly myopic regimes of stewardship, complicating local politics and economies in the process. Watt’s fine-grained account positions Point Reyes within a

Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO working for decades in Mynamar. OISCA is intriguing in its own right, with roots in a postwar new religion (Ananaikyō) and connections both to right-wing politics in Japan, and with commitments both to a kind of new Shinto-derived global environmentalism and also to a Japanist/culturalist social reform agenda. Becoming One is especially significant as an object of study given not just the NGO’s unusual pedigree, but also the historical relationship between modern Japan and Burma-Myanmar and the ways in which OISCA forces u

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (University of Washington Press, 2018) is more than a history of whaling in Japan. Jakobina K. Arch weaves together a wealth of diverse materials to demonstrate and explore the social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and religious impacts of whales on the world of Tokugawa Japan. In doing so, Arch argues powerfully for a historical vision that locates Japan within a larger global environment and also understands the fundamental interconnectedness of land and sea in particular. It is, as she writes, “nonsensical” to draw a clear dividing line between the archipelagic and the pelagic. Arch traces the history of whaling from its recorded origins in the late sixteenth century across the stretch of the Tokugawa period and into the modern period. In doing so, Bringing Whales Ashore not only contributes broadly to Tokugawa and environmental history, but also engages with the modern and contemporary politics of whaling.Learn more about your ad

The “Dust Bowl” remains a mainstay in American history textbooks. When dust storms swept over the southern plains in the 1930s, they upended farming communities and left thousands of migrants in search of brighter horizons in the “Dirty Thirties.” The historian Douglas Sheflin takes a closer look at the Dust Bowl’s long-term legacy in the often overlooked Colorado plains that border Kansas and Oklahoma. His book, Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains (University of Nebraska, 2019), shows that the Dust Bowl changed the environment, land-use patterns, and labor structures in the region for decades beyond the disaster.Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltateLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most consistent chronicler of contemporary issues in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Pankaj Sekhsaria's writings on the environment, wildlife conservation, development and indigenous communities have provided insights and perspective on the life of the islands for over two decades. Islands in Flux: The Andaman and Nicobar Story (HarperCollins India, 2017) is a compilation of Sekhsaria's writings on key issues in the Islands over this period and provides an important, consolidated account that is relevant both for the present and the future of this beautiful but also very fragile and volatile island chain. The book is both a map of the region as well as a framework for the way forward, and essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of our world.Pankaj Sekhsaria is Associate Professor at the Center for Technology Alternatives in Rural Areas and the Center for Policy Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Sekhsaria is also a long time member of the Environment Action Grou

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with University of Pittsburgh Press (2018).Part I, originally posted in November 2017, focuses on the goals and events of the expedition. Part II offers new material from the interview in which Clements discusses the expedition party’s scientific findings and treatment of local Sherpas. It also discusses the expedition’s broader relevance to the study of environmental history and climate change.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and explorati

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight. Today I speak with David Munns, professor of history at John Jay College, about his new book, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), but we also talk about Matt Damon, shitting in space, and growing pot in your dorm room.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, an

David Karol’s new book, Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the history of environmental policy within American political parties. He ably integrates the early conservation movement into the discussion, providing foundational understandings of the distinction between the conservationists at the beginning of the 20th century and the growth and evolution of the environmental movement in the second half of the 20th century. Red, Green, and Blue also compares the U.S. engagement with “green” politics and how environmentalism and green social movements have operated in other developed, western democracies. The thrust of this book, which is part of the Element series at Cambridge University Press, is to focus on how, where, and why environmental policy became more acutely partisan. Karol also examines the functioning of party coalitions and interest groups as they wove together around environmental issues.Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Polit

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science fiction, but in Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society. The first parts of Masdar City opened beside the Abu Dhabi airport in 2010 as an oil-wealth funded initiative to establish the UAE as a leader in the renewable energy sector and to begin to prepare the emirates for a low or post-oil economy. Masdar attracted students and researchers from around the world to test, and be test subjects, for innovations including personal rapid transit, energy currencies, carbon capture and storage, and closed-loop resource circuits. Quickly, however, the master plan was abandoned as unworkable; but Masdar City has also not been a

In Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet(University of Nebraska Press, 2017), author Rosalyn LaPier, an associate professor in environmental studies at the University of Montana, complicates several narratives about Native people and the nonhuman world. Rather than “living in harmony with nature,” as stereotyped by the ecological Indian mythos, the Blackfeet people of the northern plains believed they could marshal supernatural forces to bend the nonhuman world to their will. Stories and narratives about these powerful supernatural forces from Native voices filtered through white anthropologists notes and recordings via a robust storytelling economy that existed on the Blackfeet Reservation during the early decades of the twentieth century. Rather than “exploiting Grandma,” Blackfeet storytellers used their leverage as keepers of Indigenous knowledge to extract cash payments from whites seeking Blackfeet narratives and knowledge. LaPier’s book is part person

It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa. In The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa (Reprint edition; Cambridge University Press, 2016), James L. A. Webb explains the disproportionate impact that malaria has on the African continent by examining the evolution of parasites, vectors, and human hosts and the different attempts at controlling and eradicating the disease. The author investigates these histories in the context of colonialism, independence, population movement, demographic growth, economic development, urbanization and violent conflict. This book is a contribution to the emerging field of historical epidemiology and makes use of archival sources previously unavailable to historians. It offers important insights to historians of Africa, as well as to students of medicine and public health.Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State Univers

With its long and well-documented history, Prince Edward Island makes a compelling case study for thousands of years of human interaction with a specific ecosystem. The pastoral landscapes, red sandstone cliffs, and small fishing villages of Canada’s “garden province” are appealing because they appear timeless, but they are as culturally constructed as they are shaped by the ebb and flow of the tides.Bringing together experts from a multitude of disciplines, the essays in Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016) explore the island’s marine and terrestrial environment from its prehistory to its recent past. Beginning with PEI’s history as a blank slate - a land scraped by ice and then surrounded by rising seas - this mosaic of essays documents the arrival of flora, fauna, and humans, and the different ways these inhabitants have lived in this place over time. The collection, edited by History Professor Edward MacDonald and Communications Profess

The Great West. Middle America. Flyover Country. The expanse of plains, lakes, forests, and farms, between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains has carried many names. Beginning in the twentieth century, Americans began calling it The Heartland, a term that Dr. Kristin L. Hoganson argues carried a specific meaning that has changed across time. In The Heartland: An American History (Penguin, 2019), Hoganson tracks the global history of Champaign, Illinois – a small place with a large history, and, as a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Hoganson’s home for nearly two decades. The Heartland makes a strong case for the Midwest not as a provincial, isolated, region but rather as a place defined by global connections, diasporas, and a wide array of cultures. The book covers a lot of ground, from Kickapoo history to the story of high-bred cattle to a foray into the history of long-distance ballooning. Throughout, Hoganson maintains that just as scholars study the West and the South, the Heartland is

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene -- our period in time where there are no longer places on Earth untouched by humans -- is not only how much impact humans have had, but how much deliberate shaping humans will do. To help us understand the Synthetic Age, Dr. Preston details the emerging fields of study and accompanying technologies that may allow for a world designed by humans. He walks us through the advent of nano-scale technologies to the possibilities of deliberate marco-level ecosystem and atmospheric management.What’s more, we’re not only faced with a plethora of possibility, but journey through historical and ongoing debates regarding the ethics of it all. In fact, The Synthetic Age, is part history of emerging technologies, part mini-biography of all the key persons involved, and part window into the continued ethical debate among enthusiast

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil.  In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreens.  In his excellent new book The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Robert A. Voeks explains that while rainforests may indeed have much to offer in the way of medically useful compounds, the fanfare for tropical miracle medicines and superfoods has been largely in err, counterproductive, and at times prejudicial.The jungle medicine narrative – the idea that indigenous shamans of the virgin rainforst hold the antidotes to many of humankind’s most pernicious woes – grew widespread in the 1970s after childhood leukemia was all but cured with the Madagascar periwinkle.  But the subsequent efforts of pharmaceutical companies to accelerate innovation through bioprospecting had a much deeper historical precedent.  Christopher Columbus ear